Tuesday, December 4, 2012

Jodie Foster Buys in Beverly Hills

YOUR MAMAS NOTES: Yesterday we awoke at the crack of dawn to a delicious series of covert communiques from our prodigiously plugged-in informant Freddie Finefellow who gleefully tattled to Your Mama that child star turned Oscar-winning actress/director/producer Jodie Foster (The Accused, The Silence of the Lambs, Taxi Driver) recently and very quietly paid $11,750,000 for a canyon and city view residence in Beverly Hills, CA.

Well, natch, that bit of scuttlebutt snapped the gauze from our gin saturated morning brain and, since Miz Foster—bless her heart—is notoriously famous amongst
property gossips for hiding her real estate tracks with the energetic
fastidiousness of a feline, embarked us on a good ol' fashioned celebrity real estate investigation.

Our Mister Finefellow figured the whole thing went down off-market because he was unable to locate on online listing for the pricey pad that's privately situated behind a Peeping Tom thwarting row of tremendously thick and tall hedges. Howevuh, hunties, just because the internet has been all but scrubbed clean of most listing details does not mean that Your Mama can't call on one or another of our clued-in resources to help sort out the situation.

Fortunately for y'all, our ever-efficacious and laudably efficient Fairy Godmother in Beverly Hills was able to provide us with a wee bit o' documentation that reveals the residence was originally listed in March 2012 for $14,700,000. The price quickly dropped to $13,750,000 and just about every property records data base we consulted show the property was acquired by an deliberately opaque entity in late June for—as aforeindicated—$11,750,000.

The house was sold, according to property records, by English
super-producer Colin Callender, the former president of HBO Films who
now heads up his own production company, Playground Entertainment.
Mister Callender, as per property records, picked up the property in
July 1999 for $1,625,000, a number that means he and the missus cashed in to the tune of ten million clams, not counting carrying costs, renovation expenses, real estate fees and etc.

Anyhoodles poodles, the two story center hall traditional, perched on a flat ridge top parcel of more than half an acre high above Franklin and Coldwater Canyons, is practically hidden from the street behind a towering wall of thick hedges and secured gates. This may technically be
what's known as the Beverly Hills Post Office where services are
provided by the city of L.A. and not the city of Bev Hills but—to be
honest, butter beans—we're not sure and it doesn't seem important enough
to figure out at this point. We are sure, however, there are scads of
high-fallutin' zip code snobs out there who, we hope, can and quickly will clarify that for Your
Mama and the children.

Property records show the house was originally built in 1952 and measures 3,752 square feet, although we suspect it may actually be larger. Documents surreptitiously provided by Our Fairy Godmother in Beverly Hills show the house is of undefined square footage with five bedrooms, six bathrooms and four fireplaces. There are formal living and dining rooms, a library/study and a den, and office, and eat-in kitchen and a media room equipped with a projection system.

Out front there's a gated driveway and two-car garages and a slender front yard pinched between the hedge and the house. Out back, the long, north side of the house opens to a several patios and trellised decks that spill out to a flat, narrow and long swathe of green grass. A covered terrace on the south end overlooks a dark bottomed and perfectly rectangular swimming pool backed by a visually impenetrable wall of trees and shrubbery.

Naturally we don't have any idea what Miz Foster plans to do with her
new house in Bev Hills but we have a sneaking
suspicion—let's just call it a hunch based on vague intel—she'll have it leased it out for the next couple of years.

The fiercely private but out and proud lesbian lady owns at
least one other house in the Los Angeles area, a 5,357 square foot
Spanish-style nido,* set behind high hedges in the high priced Bird Streets neighborhood above the Sunset Strip,
that she bought way back in 1995 from former supermodel Cheryl Tiegs.

In
July 2005 Miz Foster reportedly paid $8,100,000 for a 1949 Connecticut country/Cape Cod
style rancher in the flats of Beverly Hills that was once owned by Dinah
Shore. It's not clear if Miz Foster ever actually moved into the house
but property records show she sold the 7 bedroom and 8 bathroom estate in September 2011 for $8,300,000.

29 comments:

Anonymous
said...

Ms Foster is someone who seems to have almost perfect control of her personal life and career. I only wish she had run for president this last go around. She probably could fix the country. Hope we get some pics of it Mama.

I think we can all agree that Ms Foster is no shlub, so she must see something in this house; however lovely it may be, with its siting on such a narrow strip of land the appeal just escapes me --- kinda like a dog whistle, I guess.

MS. Foster's career seems in, well, the doldrums. She was the voice for Maggie Simpson recently but her two most recent movies have not been big money makers. "Beaver" had a budget of 21 million and brought in 6. "Carnage"'s budget is not known and it brought in 27 million counting foreign sales, but I suspect that is not much profit. Rotten Tomatoes gives both a ripe rating, but did either make much of a splash when they came out? I wasn't really aware of either.